by Mark Parker
“What is all this?” Zach asked.
“We aren’t the only ones who celebrate tonight,” said Van Bollin.
The Jeep lurched as it renewed its ascent.
Bonfires came in and out of view on the far peaks. Shadowy figures passed in front of them, some dancing, others jumping, some playing with what Zach took for dogs. He swiveled to check Katrina and spotted headlights lurching far down the rough service road, sticking steady behind them. Soon the Jeep stopped in a clearing at the base of a sheer rock face. With child-like excitement, Van Bollin dashed out and lifted a branch with rags coiled around one end. He took a lighter from his pocket, touched fire to cloth, and the rags erupted in flames.
Zach and the others exited the Jeep. The aroma of kerosene lingered in the air.
Van Bollin lit the wood pile with his torch. An abrupt conflagration swallowed the logs and boards. The night chill fled and heat licked at their faces. Van Bollin mounted his torch in an iron brace on a tree beside a stone ring, eight feet in diameter and two-feet high, surrounding a pool of utter darkness. He glanced over the low wall.
“What’s in there?” Zach said.
Katrina touched his lip. “Ssshhh.”
Van Bollin dragged a footlocker from the brush, opened it, and pulled out gear. Soon the dreary music for the effigy played on a portable speaker linked to his iPhone. He dropped two bulging burlap sacks from the chest at Zach’s feet, then handed him a leather case the size of a book.
He winked. “Don’t open that yet.”
“Katrina, what’s going on?” Zach said.
Ignoring him, Katrina tapped on her phone. Zach’s pocket buzzed. He checked his alerts and found a text from Tamara’s number.
Ur not really a jerk. I love u 2.
Zach stared at empty-handed Tamara, but Katrina waved a phone, sheathed in Tamara’s familiar pink, leather case. She keyed in a new message. Zach’s phone vibrated, another text from Tamara’s number.
Trick or Treat!
“Why does Katrina have your phone, Tam?” Zach said.
“What are you talking about? My phone’s right here.” Tamara reached into her pocket. Her face crinkled with surprise then worry. “Where the hell did it go?”
Katrina giggled.
An engine’s low grumble echoed from the valley. Zach scanned the mountains, the fires too distant for him to see much besides the ecstatic shapes gathered by them. The crunch of dirt and rocks beneath tires joined the engine noise. Brightness sprang from the road as Rog’s pickup truck jolted to the edge of the clearing and then squealed to a stop, headlight beams pale against the flames.
Cord drew his Roman short sword, exposing it as a long hunting knife, grabbed Katrina by the waist, and pressed the blade to her throat.
“Cord! What the hell are you doing?” said Van Bollin.
“Shut up, you old prick! Do what I say, or I’ll cut Katrina.”
“Shit, that’s Rog’s truck,” Zach said.
Van Bollin smirked at Cord. “What’s this about?”
“You and Zach are going to open your mountain vault for me.”
“Shit. That’s all? Do you believe every half-assed rumor you hear around town, Cord? There’s no cave. There’s no vault. Why would I stash a fortune out here in the mountains? You think the ‘Many Hands inside the Mountain’ would watch over it? The ghosts of a bunch a dead workers who never existed?”
“Don’t fuck with me, old man. Rog and Kevin will wait with Katrina. You and Captain Unicorn open the vault. Then I’m out of here with the money and Tam. Either of you pulls any shit, Kat dies.” Cord jerked Katrina against his chest, creasing her neck with his blade. “I’ve got your daughter, and I’ve got backup.”
“No, you don’t.” Prudence Van Bollin, Katrina’s aunt, stepped out from the driver’s side of the pickup. “Unless you mean me. But I don’t help douchebags who threaten my niece.”
Dressed in a blood-soaked wedding gown, hair matted, face streaked deep red, Prudence reached into the truck and pulled out an axe, its blade dripping. Firelight turned the blood nearly black. She wiped at it with the back of one hand, only smudging it around.
“Trying to scare me?” Cord said. “I don’t fucking scare!”
“What’s Halloween without a few good scares?” Van Bollin said.
“Rog, Kevin! Get your asses out here now!” Cord shouted.
“Don’t waste your breath. Pru, show Tamara how her boyfriends are doing.” Van Bollin nudged Tamara. “Go on. It’ll clear things up.”
Reluctantly, Tamara followed Prudence, a woman half her brother’s age, around back of the truck. Prudence lowered the tailgate then yanked off a canvas sheet. Tamara screamed and recoiled then bumped Prudence and fell to the ground. Struggling to rise, she landed on her knees, shivering, and then threw up.
“What? What is it?” Cord asked.
Blade tight to Katrina’s throat, he dragged her to the truck.
When he glanced into the bed, all the color and bravado fled his face, and his knife hand drifted from Katrina. Prudence’s face lit up, and she swung her axe. A spray of blood flew off the blade before the flat of it thumped Cord’s head, snapping it sideways and silencing the cry he’d opened his mouth to release. He dropped the knife then toppled, missing Katrina by inches.
“What did you do to them?” Zach asked.
Van Bollin’s hand came to a fatherly rest on his shoulder.
“Only what’s needed. Understand, Zach, marrying my daughter is all or nothing. We do this for the good of Bollin’s Creek. My great-grandfather started it in the Depression to keep the whole town from dying. We’ve kept the tradition ever since, so we take the lion’s share of the profit. I believe you love this town. I believe you love my daughter. Her little game with Tam’s phone was a test—you passed. Now you have to pass one for me. Go and look.”
Stomach clenched and churning, Zach inched toward the truck, hoping what he imagined proved far worse than the reality only to feel his hopes shattered when he saw Rog and Kevin’s mutilated bodies. Naked, side by side, hacked dozens of times, throats cut, and skulls opened—and from chest to groin, they lay split apart, with piles of candy stuffed in among their organs. Plastic wrappers and colorful logos glistened with blood. Hershey’s bars. Skittles. M&Ms. Laffy Taffy. Life Savers. Twix. Bubble Yum. Rog and Kevin looked as if they’d fallen into a thresher alongside a candy counter. The stench of their innards flooded Zach’s nostrils. He felt a quiver in the mountain, and the sky swirled, the stars becoming fiery, golden streaks spiraling toward the flames on the other peaks. Multi-colored flashes sparked before his eyes. He switched off the lights in his collar and steadied himself against the pickup.
Prudence and her father carried Rog’s body to the pit.
Katrina, clutching Cord by the armpits, dragged him there.
Wind swirled the dirt, and the dour, oppressive music flowing from the portable speaker resonated in Zach’s mind, awakening his senses in an unfamiliar way. He took a step and almost tripped over Tamara lying in a fetal ball beside him. Katrina came back, helped her onto her feet, and walked her to the pit. She tried to break free, but Prudence whacked her with the flat of the axe, and they laid her out stunned beside Cord.
“Bring those sacks over here, would you, Zach, sweetie?” Katrina asked.
Zach did. The music made him want to comply. He looked inside one sack, filled with brightly wrapped candy, and then dropped both by Katrina.
Gradations of shadow whirlpooled within the darkness of the pit.
An enormous hand emerged, bony fingers tipped with crimson talons on an arm at least nine feet long. The hand scrabbled in the dirt until one talon sank into Rog’s throat and dragged the candy-stuffed corpse to the wall. Three similar hands came to pull Rog up and over the stone ring into the pit. Looking at them hurt Zach’s head. One second they all looked bony and hairy, and then scaly and plump the next, then fur-covered and cat-clawed, then charred, rotten, and tipped with bone-needles, then ch
itinous and coated with sharp bristles, then….
Zach shook his head and looked away.
“Hurts the eyes. You get used to it,” Van Bollin said. “We have to break the membrane to earn the treasure. This one night of the year it weakens enough for us to breach it as long as we follow tradition. ”
“Tradition?” Zach said.
“Five sacrifices and all the candy they want. Satisfy the Many Hands inside the Mountain and they’ll fill our real vault, safe in the basement of my house, with riches by morning.”
“We have to do this together so we can be married, Zach,” Katrina said.
“I… I don’t know what to do.”
The music tamped down Zach’s rising hysteria and eased his rejection of the impossible. Its elegiac melody erased his fear.
“We prepare the offering. I’ll do Cord. You do Tamara.”
“How…?”
Katrina unwrapped a Jawbreaker and popped it in her mouth. With a smile, she rammed Cord’s knife into his chest below the neck and carved downward.
Blood sprayed her face and ring mail shawl.
“Inside that case, Zach, is the blade of my great-grandfather,” Van Bollin said.
Zach undid the snap, revealing a silver knife.
“You want me to…to do this to Tamara?”
“Not like she doesn’t have it coming,” Katrina said, still sawing at Cord. “Little hussy’s been plotting against me ever since I screwed her brothers in the eighth grade.”
“You did what?” Zach asked, but Katrina only shook her head.
“Let it go, sweetie. You get to marry me,” Katrina said.
More hands reached from the pit, each with a changing number of joints, their skin and features in constant flux as if unable to comprehend their reality. Zach’s mind shuffled possibilities like a deck of cards. He looked away when they clutched at Kevin’s body.
“You said five sacrifices. Who…?” he said.
“You don’t mean you didn’t know?” said Van Bollin.
Katrina chuckled. “You and Tam have been boning like rabbits for months. What’d you think would happen? We were worried she might be barren the way you two went at it, and her as regular as can be. It was such a relief when she told me a few months ago, not that she said who the father was. But I know it’s you.”
Zach sank to his knees beside Tamara, placed his free hand on her belly, and watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed.
“She meant to get rid of it in New York, I’m sure. Bitch never could keep a secret worth a damn.” Sticky sweetness touched Zach’s lips, a caramel Katrina pushed into his mouth, her fingers leaving salty blood on his lips. “Here, it’s easier with a piece of candy.”
A grasping muddle of hands emerged from the pit. A dozen. Twenty. Forty. More. Zach couldn’t count unless he looked at them, and he couldn’t bear the pain of looking. The sight of the effigy filled his mind, its burning pumpkin eyes enmeshed by ancient writing, its engorged sex aspects, its treasure-bloated womb, and the earthy scent of the smoke from its eyes.
Break the membrane.
The music rode him. Katrina smiled. Even bloody and deranged, her smile made his heart race. She had shown him the real Bollin’s Creek as only the few who knew it could understand.
Her great-great-grandfather’s knife weighed heavy in his grip.
Giant, inhuman hands bristled from the pit like horrid flowers writhing in a vase.
Zach bit the caramel, releasing a creamy center tinged with woody bitterness.
He swallowed and it filled him with sweetness and light.
THE DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST
Annie Neugebauer
For three nights the dream had been nothing but memory replaying itself inside Hellen’s mind, restless and aware she slept but unable to wake. Helpless, she stood at the front of the crowd, refusing her father’s attempts to draw her under his arm, staring instead up at her mother’s stoic face with her own jaw clenched tight, shoulders stiff, arms wrapping her cloak about her. The morning smelled of wet wool and animal dung.
The magistrate intoned in a low, hollow voice, “On this day of the twenty-third of October on the year of our Lord, 1596, under the power vested in me by Fyvie court and condoned by the Royal Scottish commission, I hereby condemn Marjorie Urquhart to death by burning.” He lowered his torch and lit the fagots piled around her mother’s feet. They caught in a hungry billow.
The villagers had refused to mix in green wood like she asked. The younger wood smoked more, and might have sucked her mother away from misery sooner. This wood was all dry, carefully gathered.
Hellen stared into her mother’s eyes—so piercing and green. When Hellen was a lass she’d asked her father to tell her the story of how those eyes had made him fall in love with her mother, over and over. Like a living emerald, he used to say, smiling at Marjorie over Hellen’s head. Like the grass in the highlands after the spring rain. They cast a cantrip over me, those eyes. They held me enchanted. Kind she was not. She stabbed me through the heart and I loved it.
The wording no longer seemed romantic. Not after Giles had testified against his wife. Not after he had betrayed her, innocent, to prove his innocence.
Hellen shrugged off his arm, looking into those beautiful eyes.
“I love you,” Marjorie said, panic singing the edges of her tone, but still it carried the tenderness it always carried when she spoke to her only daughter. The crowd murmured, but Marjorie said again, louder, “I love you.” She could have been speaking to her husband or sons, but Hellen knew she spoke to her.
I love you too, Hellen mouthed. Her heart had never beaten so hard. Her mother was over fifty, aye, but still in good health and too young to die. She’d yearned to see Hellen married with children of her own, and with Hellen over twenty and betrothed, surely she would not have had long to bide.
The flames rose to catch the plain white robe they’d draped on her. That’s when her mother started to scream.
Perhaps it was the screams that drove the crowd back. They were the worst Hellen had ever heard, and she’d witnessed her mother midwife countless births. These screams were deeper, from a place of pure abandon. In long, rapid succession her mother screamed, drawing breath as fast as she could for the next, finally breaking her gaze with Hellen to toss her head back against the stake that held her.
Or perhaps it was the smell of burning flesh that drove the crowd back. Through the amazing orange flames her mother’s skin melted and crisped and sloughed off her legs, but still she screamed.
Hellen didn’t know if the beads of liquid dripping down her own face were sweat or tears. The heat grew fierce. The flames leaped higher. The fagots snapped with sharp pops. Her cloak dropped to the mud. Sobs shook her chest but she refused to let them out. She stared up at the underside of her mother’s throat as the screams ripped from her.
Her father tried to pull her back and she brushed him off again. He gripped her by the arm and dragged her backwards, away from the flames now wide enough to lick her. She stumbled, a shoe sticking in the shin-high muck, but she regained her balance and kept watching.
Marjorie began thrashing. Her head whipped side to side, the scream fading in and out, her arms jerking as much as her bonds would allow, and the flames climbed higher. Higher. Higher like the pitch of her relentless screams. Living agony, those shrieking wails. Someone in the back yelled out, “Mercy!” but it was far too late.
“Mercy,” another woman cried, weeping, but no one moved except her mother until, finally, she didn’t. The screams stopped, and the air was infused with the overpowering smell of burning hair, thick and sharp. “Mercy,” the woman sobbed.
Her father turned away, and the villagers followed. Her brothers followed. Everyone followed except Hellen, staying until the blackened skeleton collapsed in feathery pieces, until the flames died, until the wood and stake itself were but a pile of ashes and all that remained were the echoes of the screaming and the lingering taste of burning h
air clinging in a bitter film at the back of her throat.
Three times, Hellen had dreamed this. Every night she’d slept since it happened exactly that way, five nights ago.
This night, it was different.
This night, when she stared into her mother’s jewel-green eyes as the flames caught and billowed, dancing up her clothes and skin, her mother winked at her.
A trill of fear flipped in Hellen—not fear for her mother, but for herself—and she started, looking to see if any of the villagers had seen the gesture and what they might suppose, but she was alone. No one had come. In real life, the entirety of Fyvie, their small village north of Aberdeen, had turned out to watch the purification of Marjorie Urquhart. But now Hellen stood alone in the gray sludge.
“I’m dreaming,” Hellen muttered.
When she looked up at her mother, those sharp green eyes still stared. This was where Marjorie said, I love you. Twice, she’d said it.
Marjorie remained silent.
“I love you,” Hellen said, prompting the dream. She wanted that part.
Her mother did not scream, did not blink. Her mouth remained closed, her eyes staring into Hellen’s.
“Mother?”
The fire grew, eating away the skirt, the legs, the flesh. The smell of healthy wood smoke thickened into the aroma of cooking meat, then the tang of burning hair assaulted the air.
Her mother didn’t break the gaze, didn’t fight the pain.
The flames lapped the air, searching for new tinder. One caught the cloak over Hellen’s chest. Still she couldn’t pull her eyes away from her mother’s stare. Her silence was terrible. Hellen had thought nothing on this Earth could be worse than her mother’s screams, but surely this silence was.
Hellen was hot. Even hotter than she had been in real life. No one pulled her back this time. She must be burning. The wool smoldered over her chest, scalding her in a sharp bite.
